|
|
Three essays — Peter Gaeffke’s Kabir in Literature by and
for Muslims, Sadiqur Rahman Kidwai’s Kabir and Mystic
Poetry in Urdu and Thomas Dahnhardst’s A Contemporary
Legacy of Kabir: A Hindu-Sufi Branch and Its Relation with the
Kabir-Panth — problematise Kabir’s proximity to Islam,
Sufism and Urdu. It is a relationship that is usually taken for
granted by the assimationalist nationalist elite without much
empirical investigation. Kabir was brought within the rubric of
Urdu literature only when Urdu scholars had to defend their
territory against claims by scholars of Hindi literature. Kabir’s
rough and direct poetic style stands diametrically opposite to
the lyrical and subtle Urdu poetry right from Ghalib to Mir.
Namwar Singh,
writing very much in the ‘Dwivedian tradition’, reads
Premchand’s Kafan in the context of Kabir’s discourse
on sorrow, thus underlining the continuity of experience from
Kabir to Premchand. In the process he invokes Buddha,
Shankracharya and Rama too, ensuring thus Kabir’s irrevocable
position in the ‘great tradition’ of India. Kedarnath Singh
in his Kabir and Contemporary Hindi Poetry looks upon
Kabir as a link between Buddha from ancient past and progressive
poetry from modern present. One wonders what makes Kedarnath
believe that Kabir is a vibrant presence in modern Hindi poetry.
Except for modern progressive or janvaadi poetry in
Hindi, the fact is that most Hindi poets invariably go back to marga
paradigms in moments of existential stalemate.
The essays that
stand out for their refreshing analysis are the ones that
investigate Kabir’s legacy among present-day nath-panthis,
Dalits and other marginal tribes of north India. Bahadur Singh
discovers a seminal difference between the bhajans compiled
in Bijak and those sung by people in rural Rajasthan.
Social protest, which is generally accepted to be typical of
Kabir is quite mild in the bhajans recited by these
people. Nancy M. Martin also discovers an absence of
confrontational rough rhetoric of Bijak in Meghvali Kabir
songs. Instead, the emphasis is on "transitoriness of life
and the need for detachment". Maren Bellwinkel-Schempp in
his study of Kabir’s reception among Dalits of Kanpur, comes
to the conclusion that Raidas supercedes Kabir among the
modern-day Dalits, as both are ultimately taken to be the able
descendants of Buddha. These essays collectively question the
potential of bhakti poetry as a discourse of protest,
for, as Ranjit Guha puts it, bhakti functions more as
"an ideology of subordination", than of rigorous
social protest.
In an otherwise
very comprehensive anthology of critical perspectives on Kabir,
there are significant omissions too. Dharmvir, who in a
relentless exercise of sustained criticism running into four
books has vehemently opposed the appropriation of Kabir’s
legacy by Brahmin critics (Marxists included), should have been
given separate space in the book. Monika Horstmann, while
recounting the image of Dwivedi’s Kabir does refer to Dharmvir
for his criticism of Dwivedi, but that is too inadequate.
Absence of contentious feminist readings of overtly patriarchal
Kabir is indeed unpardonable.
|
THE
teachings of Kabir have become a tool that sectarian lobbies use to
push their respective agendas in ways which are not only arbitrary
and partial but vulgar too. Within the predominantly Tulsi-led,
Rama-centered sagun bhakti tradition, Kabir through his nirgun
bhajans had created a kind of uneasy counter-discourse — a
discourse that was later flaunted by secular Marxists as a
springboard of authentic ‘alternative tradition of India’. No
wonder the ‘Tulsi versus Kabir’ theme is central to the critical
accounts of bhakti poetry in Hindi literature. If Ramchander
Shukla in his History of Hindi Literature ran down Kabir’s
poetry as merely reactionary and sadhukkari — something
outside the classical tradition — Hazari Prasad Dwivedi later on
redeems Kabir as a refined poet who writes very much within the
rubric of the Indian tradition. In the book Monica Horstmann
presents an array of shifting ‘pre- and post-Dwivedian’
paradigms of Kabir across communities and cultures, through a
compilation of 17 papers presented at a conference in Germany.
